Cartoonist Tony Reeve and I were both mad fans of Patrick McGoohan's legendary television show, The Prisoner, and it was entirely because of the show that we first met.

Much of The Prisoner was filmed in and around the idyllic private village/hotel of Portmeirion in North Wales. It was the life's work of the groundbreaking Welsh architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, who was a pioneer of planned communities, an early voice for conservation and the National Trust, and a saviour of spectacular architecture. During the middle part of the Twentieth Century, Clough purchased, received, rescued, and relocated numerous pieces of beautiful, important, or whimsical architecture — ranging from a statue of Atlas to an entire classical town hall with plaster bas-relief ceiling — and resurrected them among the quiet trees and rhododendrons of Portmeirion. Noel Coward was a fan of the place and wrote his masterpiece, Blithe Spirit, there. McGoohan filmed a few episodes of his earlier TV series Danger Man (known as Secret Agent in the US) at Portmeirion, and then used it as the primary location for The Prisoner, which just added to the show's mysterious and moody atmosphere.

Portmeirion is a listed site of architectural and historical importance, which means it remains preserved in a state virtually idetical to when The Prisoner was filmed there in the late 1960s. As a result, fans going to a Prisoner convention can dress up in costume, recreate favorite scenes from the show, and generally immerse themselves in the actual and magical place where it all happened. It would be like Star Wars fans being able to hold a convention in Mos Eisley Spaceport.

I met Tony Reeve at Portmeirion in the late 1980s. I was walking up to the Town Hall (which doubled as a pub) one evening and noticed some friends talking to a very tall fellow. At the time, I was working in the comics industry in New York City and one of my pals said: "Hey Geoff, did you know that Tony here is also a cartoonist?"

I asked him to tell me more but he politely and shyly declined several times, gently insisting that I could not possibly have heard of his work. I pressed back, gently as well, until he admitted that he drew "a little strip" called P-Nuts, which was a parody of The Prisoner executed in a vaguely Charles Schultz-like style. P-Nuts was one of my favorite strips of the era and when I blurted out: "Wait ... are you the Tony Reeve?!" he looked a bit shy, and was convinced someone had put me up to the whole thing as a prank. And Tony was a bit shy at times. He was also overly tall, and boney, in a Joey Ramone way. He had a really big chin and a pockmarked face, and I guess nobody could ever claim that he was handsome in a conventional way, but he was very striking, brilliant, extremely funny, and made fun of his awkward body in a way that made him even more endearing to his friends. As if that wasn't enough, poor old Tony had a bad heart, terrible eyesight, and other health problems, which he chose to joke about, rather than complain.

After my mother died in the late 1990s, my regular trips from New York back to the London of my youth became less frequent. My brother, Andrew, also left home for the States and then my father relocated to Ireland. I lost touch with most of the people I had grown up with, but Tony steadfastly remained one of only two close friends that I always made a special effort to see whenever I returned to England. Tony loved cinema, art, science fiction, comics, and could always be counted on to go with me, at no notice, to any new and entirely off-the-wall, avant-garde art exhibition ... or opening night of the latest Cronenberg film. The weirder, the better as far as he was concrned. Tony visited me in the States as well. We had many adventures in Manhattan and he was equally entertaining on either side of the Atlantic — a quietly irreverent intellectual of the first order.

Tony was well known as a political cartoonist in the UK and was published by Private Eye, Punch, The Spectator, and The Independent among others. He was interested in everything and was one of the few people in my entire life with whom I could simply talk for hours without getting bored or distracted. He kept up with every facet of local politics (as a satirical cartoonist I suppose he had to) and had plenty of opinions about what was wrong with the British Government, the way in which London was managed, and the arts scene, and he didn't mind sharing those opinions in a humorous, sophisticated, and vaguely anti-establisment manner, which is just one of many reasons we got along so well.

Money was always a bit tight for Tony, but somehow he managed to do that most difficult and desirable of all bohemian things — make a living solely as an actual cartoonist. It's the one dream that all boys share at some point in their lives. Well, that and astronauts. And Tony with that terrible eyesight of his, which made his succes even more incredible — much like a mechanic running a busy service station / garage with two broken hands.

Tony also met venerable Welsh character actor Kenneth Griffith (The Prisoner, Four Weddings and A Funeral, The Englishmen) at a Prisoner convention. He and Ken became friends and, eventually, housemates. Tony rented the top floor of Ken's townhouse and put his cartooning studio up there. Whenever I'd call to make plans with Tony, it was surreal and slightly jarring to have the great Kenneth Griffith personally answer the telephone in a highly proper manner. I was a fan — a big fan — and Ken was always working so I always had something new to say, like: "Ken, it was great to see you in the new episode of Lovejoy last week." To which he'd answer: "Oh, bless you, dear boy!"

Tony's best story was about the night Ken yelled upstairs for him to come down from the studio and explain how to do something in the kitchen. When Tony shuffled in, no doubt stooping slightly to fit himself through the regular-human-sized doorway, he discovered a brightly intoxicated Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris sitting at the table with Ken, pounding down whisky, and demanding that hot food be served. "And so, I showed a plastered O'Toole, Harris, and Kenneth Griffith how to roast a chicken. And I was completely sober."

As his crippled heart continued to degenerate, Tony had a pacemaker installed. He told me he was surprised by how loud it was, ticking away inside him. He also told me that he could continue to drink alcohol, but had to inform the surgeon before the operation precisely how much alcohol he intended to consume. And then have exactly that amount — no more and no less — each and every day forever. Rather sensibly, I thought, Tony opted for none at all. But, of course, there was another guy having a similar operation on the same day who elected to have his pacemaker calibrated with the obligation to consume five pints of strong British ale every night for the rest of his life. There often seemed to be someone like that, traveling on a track very nearly parallel to Tony's, someone whose life was impossibly strange and probably best left unexamined.

"So ... you can hear it inside your body?" I went back to the topic of the pacemaker.

"Oh yeah, I had trouble sleeping after they put it in, but you sort of get used to it."

I suggested that he immediately start an autobiographical comic strip about his experiences, called The Ticking Man.

One night I had a vivid dream in which Tony devised a radical and experimental new comic strip called Mr. Upside-Down. He showed it to me in the dream. The layout was as you'd expect — regular panels and such — except for the fact that the nutty protagonist walked around the wrong way up, with his feet on the "ceiling" of the cartoon panels, while everyone else stood as they should, according to the unforgiving laws of gravity. Mr. Upside-Down's word ballons were also upside-down, so you had to rotate the page to read what he was saying. It was strange, funny, slightly disturbing, and absolutely captivating. I woke up desperately wanting to read more of the nonexistant strip. When I saw Tony next, in the real and waking world, I related the story to him and told him I thought he should actually create the strip.

"No, you should do it," he said. "It's much more your kind of thing. But if you do draw it, I should get royalties because it was my idea."

"But it was only your idea in my dream, so it's still mine," I argued.

"No," Tony replied, firmly. "Even though I was a figment of your imagination at that moment, the 'I' in your dream was still based on the real me in the real world, so it's still my idea becayse ut came from my extrapolated head, in your dream." He was joking, of course, but only partially, because he could always be counted on to debate using existential humor, and so I agreed that if I ever developed Mr. Upside-Down, I would pay him a reasonable royalty fee.

I suppose it's much too late for any of that now. Heart failure got Tony, years ago. He was scheduled for heart surgery — again — but was fed up with the pain he'd endured for so many years as a result of numerous earlier attempts. So, he declined the operation. Just said no. That was Tony, defiant right up to the end. They put him on a ton of pain killers and sedatives and he slipped away.

I wish he'd told me what he was doing. I would have talked him out of it. I would even have done the Mr. Upside-Down strip as a joint effort with him if he agreed to hang on for another year or ten. I was thinking about him today and how much I would like to get together one more time and absorb his comprehensive and slightly caustic take on complicated current London politics, and then maybe deconstruct The Prisoner again, for a few hours, or days. Maybe revisit the Tate Modern too, which was a favorite haunt of ours, or go to the cinema and gaze in appreciative silence at a bizarre indie film I'd never heard of (because Tony was one of those rare and valuable friends who knew never to talk or whisper at me in the movies). I would have liked that a whole lot because, as we get older, it seems damn difficult to find solid friends like him again. Solid, and comfortable to be with.

I was sad, but not really suprised, to discovery that Tony's cool website has vanished into the ether. What happens to our websites, that we put all that time into, when we're gone and there is no family or disciples to tend to them? I suppose one day the hosting money runs out, unnoticed by all save the hosting company, and our work just goes away into nothingness. At least I have scans of some of my favorite Tony Reeve comics saved, and also four adored pages of his originals in my art collection. It is a testament to Tony's sense of humor that the shark cartoon still makes me smile after all this time. I love it so much, and it's such a wry poke at modern art with, I suppose, an anthropological twist. But, I feel it contains at least one additional layer of meaning that I have yet to fully understand.

So, dear friend Tony, with that in mind and after many years of careful deliberation I have now decided it is the right and only thing to do, to finally and irrevocably assign to you, in perpetuity and throughout the universe, all rights to Mr. Upside-Down. Just in case you want to work on it — you know — one day. I'm sure it'll be brilliant.